PATRICK R. RICCARDS NAMED DIRECTOR AT WOODROW WILSON FOUNDATION

PRINCETON, N.J.—The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation announced that Patrick R. Riccards has joined its communications team as director of media relations and strategy.

Riccards is an award-winning education communications strategist with nearly 20 years of communications and public engagement experience. He was previously CEO of the Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now and, prior to that, executive director of communications and public affairs at American Institutes for research. PR News named Riccards its Public Affairs Professional of the Year in 2013. He was also Bulldog Reporter’s 2011 Not-for-Profit Communications Professional of the Year.

Riccards has also served in senior communications positions for many of the nation’s leading education communications agencies, including roles as executive director of the Pennsylvania STEM Initiative and as de facto chief of staff and counsel to the congressionally mandated National Reading Panel. He began his career on Capitol Hill, holding communications posts for U.S. Sen. Robert C. Byrd (WV), U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley (NJ), and U.S. Rep. John Olver (MA).

“The Woodrow Wilson Foundation is leading a national effort to transform how we prepare educators for the classroom and how we ensure high-need schools have the teachers and innovators they need and deserve,” Riccards said. “With its work in states like Georgia, Indiana, Michigan, New Jersey, and Ohio, the Foundation has an incredible story to tell. I am thrilled to be able to help tell it and share the lessons learned through the Foundation’s work to strengthen our nation’s schools and communities.”

The Foundation’s education reform initiatives include the Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellowships, providing master’s-level preparation for high-achieving individuals with backgrounds in science and mathematics to teach in high-need high schools. Another recent program, the Woodrow Wilson MBA Fellowship in Education Leadership, prepares school, district, and charter leaders, blending an education-based business curriculum with clinical experience in schools, corporations and nonprofits.

Other Woodrow Wilson programs include fellowships that prepare candidates for the U.S. Foreign Service, administered on behalf of the Department of State; support dissertation work in ethics and religious values, funded by the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation; and offer awards for graduate study in various other fields.

“For two decades, Patrick has worked with institutions, educators, and policymakers to help improve public education and make the American Dream a reality for all of our children,” said Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. “Patrick brings to Woodrow Wilson the knowledge and experience essential to advance the Foundation’s work of identifying and developing leaders to address the nation’s educational challenges. We are thrilled that Patrick has joined us.”

A University of Virginia graduate, Riccards is author or lead editor of more than two dozen education research studies, beginning with the NRP’s Teaching Children to Read report. He is the author of Dadprovement (Turning Stone Press, 2014) and is lead editor and contributing author for the forthcoming second edition of Why Kids Can’t Read: Challenging the Status Quo in Education (Rowman Littlefield Education, 2014). He is the creator and author of Eduflack, a nationally recognized blog focused on the intersection of education research, policy, politics, and communications, and its companion @Eduflack Twitter feed.

The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation of Princeton, New Jersey identifies and develops leaders to meet the nation’s most critical challenges. In 1945, the Foundation was created to meet the challenge of preparing a new generation of college professors. Today Woodrow Wilson offers a suite of fellowships to address national needs, including the education of teachers and school leaders.

About Kennesaw State University

As a leading producer of teachers in the state of Georgia, the Bagwell College of Education at Kennesaw State University strives to prepare educators to improve student learning within a collaborative teaching and learning community through innovative teaching, purposeful research and engaged service.

Bagwell College plays a leading role in the Educator Preparation Provider (EPP) collaborative group at Kennesaw State, which also includes educators affiliated with nine academic departments in four other colleges. Our programs are nationally recognized and approved by the National Council on the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). The only nationally recognized Middle Grades Teacher Education program in Georgia is at Kennesaw State.

Teacher Preparation at KSU

The Woodrow Wilson Georgia Teaching Fellowship at Kennesaw State University is a 15-month/36-credit hour graduate study followed by three years of teaching and mentoring. Preparation extends into the first three years of teaching in urban or rural schools, incorporating induction and mentoring programs that feature ongoing school-university cooperation. The Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellowship at KSU will be uniquely defined by the following characteristics:

A co-teaching model between mentor teacher and Fellow with co-teaching preparation for both the mentor teacher and Fellow

Flexible-integrated course delivery

University faculty collaboration between content and education experts

Commitment to diverse learners with opportunities to obtain endorsements or experiences in ESOL, special education, gifted, or Advanced Placement/IB

Instructional technology integration

Action research embedded performance measures

* Clinical instruction begins in the earliest days of the program, with at least four days per week in schools throughout the program, while providing frequent feedback and giving Fellows increasing responsibilities as teachers.

* Fellows are matched with a highly qualified master teacher mentor, as well as another mentor from the university.

The biggest problem in mental health is our tendency to compartmentalize mental illness—to separate people with mental illness from others and to separate mental illness from overall health. “Mental illness almost invariably is a sidecar to some other discussion, rather than a more general discussion about what it means to think seriously about health in a variety of departments,” says, Dr. Kim J. Hopper CN ’86, medical anthropologist and professor of clinical sociomedical sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University and co-director of the Center for the Study of Issues in Public Mental Health at the Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research.

Improving the quality of life for people with mental health issues, one of Dr. Hopper’s main concerns as a medical anthropologist, necessitates collaboration from other institutional entities that do not see mental health as part of their purview. In a recent project, Dr. Hopper and his colleagues reimagined all people with severe mental illnesses in New York City—regardless of their living situation, whether with family, institutionalized, or on their own—as inhabiting their own country, then applied Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach and the United Nations Human Development Index. The analysis showed that “they live at roughly the level of a Moroccan peasant. Their life expectancy can be as much as 20 years less than other folks. Their literacy rates are terrible and their income is set at a rate that essentially expects them to live for free every sixth day.”

So if the ability to pursue a life of one’s own is an index of recovery from mental illness, what would it take to help these New Yorkers recover? “It takes not only a great deal of work on individual agency, Sen’s engine of development at the individual level,” Dr. Hopper notes, “but it also means reworking the environment so that the necessary resources are available to feed that agency: education, jobs, and, of course, affordable housing—resources which for this group are in restricted, and often qualified, settings. We argued that mental health could not do its job without the partnership and collaboration of these other institutions. We found, for the most part, that there was no conversation going on, so it managed to get a lot of conversations started.”

Through this work Dr. Hopper got involved in the recently funded Parachute NYC program, which seeks to change the way health and social professionals respond to young people in a mental health crisis, minimizing initial damage. Borrowing from a Scandinavian public psychiatry model of crisis response/respite, the Parachute program will offer a “soft landing” instead of a traumatizing “hospitalize/diagnose/medicate” response. The first response will be to convene the family and other affected parties into working groups led by therapeutic teams. “[It] tends to hold back on the question of ‘Is this a mental illness and if so, what’s its name?’ in favor of ‘What’s going on here and how can this group be differently configured so that everybody can live together?’” If the individual does need to be extracted from the family setting, he or she receives a crisis respite placement in a non-hospital, non-medical setting, staffed by peers who have been through similar ordeals. “It’s got more than its share of implementation difficulties,” says Dr. Hopper, “but it’s also got some really interesting implications.”

It was during his work as a Newcombe Fellow that Dr. Hopper became interested in questions about mental health care. “I was in philosophy of religion, doing work on values and philosophy and trying to figure out how they should apply to medical quandaries in the clinical setting,” he recalls. “The more I got into it, the more I realized that the values that we really should care about are ones that are built into everyday assumptions about right and wrong, proper and improper, good and not-so-good. That’s what I took to mental health, because it’s those assumptions about essentially what’s good enough for people with mental illness that need challenging,” explains Dr. Hopper. “It’s about trying to find a better way of asking how we establish a floor beneath this question of what suffices as adequate for a variety of quality of life issues for people who have this diagnosis or have seen this diagnosis sometime in the past. My issues are still all heavily driven by that concern.

Staff Leadership

OFFICERS

Arthur Levine (levine@woodrow.org) is the sixth president of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Before his appointment at Woodrow Wilson in 2006, he was president and professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He also previously served as chair of the higher education program, chair of the Institute for Educational Management, and senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Dr. Levine is the author or co-author of ten books and dozens of articles and reviews, including a series of reports for the Education Schools Project on the preparation of school leaders, teachers, and education researchers. Dr. Levine’s numerous commentaries appear in such publications as The New York Times; The Los Angeles Times; The Wall Street Journal; The Washington Post; Education Week; and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His most recent book is Generation on a Tightrope: A Portrait of Today’s College Student (with Diane Dean, 2012). | Full bio

Stephanie J. Hull (hull@woodrow.org) came to the Woodrow Wilson Foundation in 2012 as Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer. She began her academic career as an assistant professor in the Department of French and Italian at Dartmouth College, subsequently becoming Assistant Dean of the College. After six years at Dartmouth, Dr. Hull went on to serve as the Assistant to the President and Secretary of the College at Mount Holyoke College, then as Head of the Brearley School, a girls’ K–12 college preparatory school in New York City, where she led a highly successful capital campaign and long-range planning process and oversaw the introduction of a number of new initiatives. She earned her bachelor’s degree in French literature at Wellesley College and her master’s and doctoral degrees at Harvard University in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. | Full bio

Beverly Sanford (sanford@woodrow.org) is Vice President of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. She also serves as Secretary of the Foundation, a position elected by the Woodrow Wilson Board of Trustees. Prior to joining the Woodrow Wilson staff in 2002, Ms. Sanford served first as communications director for the president of the University at Buffalo (SUNY), then as associate director of the UB Regional Institute. A graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she completed an M.A. and Ph.D. coursework at the University at Buffalo.

LeAnn Buntrock (buntrock@woodrow.org) joined the Woodrow Wilson staff in 2013 as Director of the Woodrow Wilson M.B.A. Fellowship in Education Leadership. She was formerly Executive Director of the Darden/Curry Partnership for Leaders in Education at the University of Virginia. Dr. Buntrock earned her J.D. from the University of Richmond and her Ph.D. in education policy from the University of Virginia. Her background demonstrates her deep commitment to education, ranging from her early years as a teacher in elementary education to a several years of advocacy in education and family law.

Ambassador James Gadsden (gadsden@woodrow.org) is Senior Counselor for International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, with responsibility for both advising on the development of new programs and providing counsel and guidance for the Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellowships. Ambassador Gadsden, formerly Diplomat-in-Residence and Lecturer in Public and International Affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, served as U.S. Ambassador to Iceland from 2002 until 2005. He completed his undergraduate degree in economics at Harvard University, followed by a master’s degree in East Asian Studies at Stanford University and further graduate work in economics at Princeton.

Deborah Hirsch (hirsch@woodrow.org) is Executive Director of the Woodrow Wilson Teaching and Learning Lab. She most recently served as Vice President for Development and Director of External Relations at Mount Ida College in Newton, Massachusetts, where she was previously Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs and Acting Vice President for Academic Affairs. Prior to Mount Ida, Deborah was the Executive Director of the Boston Higher Education Partnership and Director of the New England Resource Center for Higher Education. She graduated summa cum laude from Boston University and holds master’s degrees in education from the University at Buffalo and Harvard University, as well as a doctorate in education from Harvard University.

Caryl McFarlane (mcfarlane@woodrow.org) is Senior Program Officer for the Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellowships and Mellon Programs at the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Before coming to Woodrow Wilson in 2010, she was the director/initiator of an overseas summer program for children and a literature teacher at Princeton Day School. She earned her B.A. in English at Queens College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in English at Rutgers University.

Jose F. Ochoa (ochoa@woodrow.org) is Director of the Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellowships. He was previously Director of MPP Admissions and Programs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, joining the Woodrow Wilson Foundation staff in 2013. He previously served as Associate Director for Enrollment Management at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education, and was Assistant Director of Scholarship Programs at the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering. He earned his B.A. in political science from Rutgers University and an M.A. in liberal studies from NYU. He is an alumnus of the U.S.-Spain Young Leaders Program.

Patrick Riccards (riccards@woodrow.org) is Director of Media Relations and Strategy. Patrick began his career on Capitol Hill, where he served in senior communications positions for members of the U.S. Senate and U.S. House. The former executive director for communications and public affairs at American Institutes for Research, he has also served as executive director of the Pennsylvania STEM Initiative and de facto chief of staff for the National Reading Panel. Pat is widely known on social media for his blog and Twitter feed, @Eduflack, and he has won numerous national awards for his work in education communications and public engagement. Pat holds a B.A. in Government and in Rhetoric and Communications Studies from the University of Virginia.

Audra M. Watson (watson@woodrow.org), Director of Mentoring & Induction Strategy and Program Officer, has lead responsibility for the mentoring components of the Foundation’s various Fellowships. She is also a doctoral student focused on Urban Education Policy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She previously worked with the New York City Department of Education, directing mentoring and teacher development programs.

Alice Dreger CN ’94: At the Intersections

Alice Dreger CN ’94 works at intersections—the intersection of medicine and ethics, of research and activism, of traditional academic work and publications for the general public. And she works with people whose anatomy falls between classical categories, and who find themselves carving out identities in those intersections.

“I wear two hats in most of what I do,” Dr. Dreger explains. “Under one hat, I do history of anatomy. I’m a historian by training, and what I study in that case is the way that people have dealt with anatomy…The other hat that I’ve worn in my work is as an activist, as a patient advocate—or, as I sometimes say, as an impatient advocate…. In that case, I’ve worked with people who have body types that challenge social norms.”

While her work encompasses the experience of individuals with a range of birth anomalies—conjoined twinning and dwarfism, for example—she is particularly known for her work with those who are intersex. As defined by the Intersex Society of North America, intersex is “a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male.”

Now professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics in Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, Dr. Dreger first became interested in intersex and other birth anomalies when her dissertation advisor suggested she look into hermaphrodites and the history of medicine. The connection between the two was not immediately apparent to Dr. Dreger, and she was surprised by what she found. “I looked at the Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General and there were 400 cases. And I thought ‘How is it I’ve never heard of this?'” she recalls. “I became really interested simply because of the fact that I had never heard of it and yet here, even in the 19th century, was this huge wealth of literature.” The dissertation became Dr. Dreger’s first book, Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex (Harvard University Press, 1998), which examines how doctors and scientists treated intersex people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and how they are treated in present-day medicine.

Reading case studies, getting to know people with various birth anomalies, and hearing about their medical histories led Dr. Dreger to a more active interest. “I became fascinated and wanted to figure out if there were other realms of medicine where people behaved in this very strange fashion—where they lie to patients and do surgeries on children purely for cosmetic reasons without evidence that it helps. I started looking at case studies and, inevitably, running into people who had these birth anomalies or whose children had them. Getting to know those people, I became fascinated with the current system, and became an advocate for that population in trying to change it.”

Historical research and contemporary activism, Dr. Dreger says, “come together on issues of evidence. I’m a more subtle advocate than I think many people are because I’m not actually in it for the identity claim. I want to know what’s going to help and what’s going to hurt. So I look at the evidence—and sometimes the evidence goes against what activists say or want, and I have to disagree with them. Being trained in the history and philosophy of science, I’m still, at the end of the day, a big old science geek, and I really want to know: What does the evidence show?”

To change the system takes a combination of mass education and personal relationships, she explains. “It took me a lot of time to learn that social change actually happens through personal relationships,” Dr. Dreger says. “Some social change has to be tackled from the other end—which is to change conventional wisdom—and that I do through the media. But you have to do that one-two punch to actually get the change to happen. When you tackle both ends, personal relationships and public perception, you begin to get this feedback loop: The experts are hearing conventional wisdom change and they literally say to me, ‘Well, the culture’s changed enough that we can move in the direction you’re suggesting,’ and then the culture says, ‘Well, the doctor says that’s where we should be going, to change this, so it must be true.’ And nobody seems to realize you’re puppeting the whole thing from behind. It’s doing those two things together, I think, that is finally effective.”

Dr. Dreger’s commitment to mass education has made her a significant presence in the media and online. Mainstream media outlets and programs often consult her as an expert on intersex; she also maintains a personal website and blog, as well as a blog on Psychology Today (“Fetishes I Don’t Get”), and frequently posts on the Hastings Center’s Bioethics Forum. “At my core I’m really a writer,” she says. “I always wanted to write in mainstream venues, but it’s also clear that the Web is a place where you can directly access people’s minds and work for change. And being in a 24-hour news cycle, if I want to piggyback on some international story and twist the conversation in a direction that might produce some progress towards people opening their minds, the Web is a way to do that.”

She cites Caster Semenya, a South African runner whose sex was called into question by sports officials, as an example. “I dropped everything and made sure that I used that for a moment of international sex education,” says Dr. Dreger. “For the first time, the whole world was ready to talk about sex anomalies, and I thought: here’s a perfect moment to educate, educate, educate. I put a media advisory up on my own website that went through the same questions reporters were asking me. I just wanted to get some of them not to say ‘she has two sets of genitals,’ not to say ‘you’re a man if you have a Y chromosome.’ I was stunned when somebody wrote to me and said, ‘I read your quote in USA Today,’ and I thought ‘I didn’t talk to USA Today this week.’ It was a quote from the media advisory. And so a few million people got the story a little closer to right.”

Getting the story or the reform right is not a simple issue. Recently, the Australian government announced that passport applications would now include a third sex category: “X.” While the move might seem to be a step in the right direction, Dr. Dreger explains why “X” is not an option. “The truth is that there aren’t three sex categories in nature—male, female, and intersex. In nature, sex blends in complicated ways from one variation to another. The idea that there is a third category legitimizes the other two categories as if they are natural, when in fact the truth is that nature doesn’t draw these lines; we draw the lines on nature. I admire Australia for moving forward, but I think they’re still stumbling a bit on the details.” (Read Dr. Dreger’s blog post on the topic at Psychology Today.)

As much as Dr. Dreger is in the public eye, “there’s a lot of stuff that people never see that I do,” she says, such as consultancy work with doctors and scientists and helping individuals with birth anomalies that reach out to her. “Every day I get emails from people seeking help with some issue. Sometimes I can just send them to other websites and groups. But a few times a year I’ll run into somebody who really needs personal service, for whom it’s not enough to say ‘you need to join this support group’—someone who really needs to figure out what it says in their medical charts from the 1960s and 1970s. They have a Xerox copy of a Xerox copy and the handwriting’s unclear and the terms are unfamiliar. I’ll sit down with them and say, ‘Let’s figure this out.’ And I’ll call a bunch of docs and they’ll help me out.” She has written about helping individuals discover surgeries done at birth to address their intersex, and—in one particularly poignant essay—about helping a mother find information on the stillborn conjoined twins taken from her years before.

It’s this “history work” that Dr. Dreger would love to do full time. “If someone handed me a million dollars and said, ‘Do whatever you want with it,’ I would set up a group of pro bono, client-centered historians who would help people who’ve been through traumatic events by simply doing narratives. The psychological literature is very powerful on this: creating narratives around traumatic events helps people heal. There would be a historian stationed within the hospital, there purely for the purpose of taking a history—not a medical history but a history of the trauma. That person could give the patient a purely descriptive written document that says, ‘This is what you’ve been through,’ and provides historical context: ‘This is what was happening in the 1960s when you were being treated. This is what was happening in your nation at the time.’ And they would draw on all the historical wisdom and provide people context of their lives and give them that solace. That is really at this point in my life what I’d love to be doing. It’s so satisfying. The way people say ‘thank you’ when I write their four-page history is like no other ‘thank you’ in the world.”

Dr. Dreger is currently finishing her next book—”a memoir of other people’s lives” tentatively titled Galileo’s Middle Finger: Science and Identity Politics in the Internet Age. “It’s a first-person account of having worked inside, and having investigated the history, of scientific controversies. It’s an attempt to examine where we are now in the world in terms of how scientists and doctors interact with activists. Since I’ve been on both sides and have been sympathetic to both camps and helped both camps, I feel well-positioned to care about them both and to try to come up with solutions to the way that we deal with issues of human identity. A lot of the book is about trying to live the life of a historian but still remain very much engaged with our changing world.”

2012 NEWCOMBE FELLOWS NAMED AT WOODROW WILSON FOUNDATION

Doctoral candidates working on religious and ethical values
are 32nd group named in prestigious fellowship program

PRINCETON, NJ—The moral distinctions that shape the Tea Party movement, modern understandings of Sufism and their relation to liberal Islam, 20th-century religious and humanitarian missions to Africa, everyday social speech and democratic politics: These are just a few of the topics addressed by the 2012 Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellows.

The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, which has administered the Newcombe Fellowship for more than three decades, has announced the selection of 21 Newcombe Fellows for the upcoming 2012-13 academic year. These Fellows are doctoral candidates writing dissertations on topics involving religious and ethical values. Each Newcombe Fellow receives a 12-month award of $25,000.

Of the 550 applicants for the 2012 Fellowship, 58 were named as finalists. The 21 Fellows ultimately selected include scholars in religion, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, literature, political science, art history, Asian studies, and Near Eastern studies. They come from 13 institutions nationwide. (See full list of the 2012 Fellows below.)

Funded by the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the Newcombe Fellowship was created in 1981. It remains the nation’s largest and most prestigious such award for Ph.D. candidates in the humanities and social sciences addressing questions of ethical and religious values.

“The Newcombe Foundation Trustees are deeply gratified that Newcombe Fellowships have had significant positive impact on so many scholars’ professional lives, and that these scholars have made many noteworthy contributions to the scholarship of ethics and religion,” said Thomas N. Wilfrid, Executive Director of the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation.

Over the past three decades, the Newcombe Fellowship has supported just over 1,100 doctoral candidates, most of them now noted faculty members at colleges and universities throughout the U.S. and abroad.

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The Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation continues Mrs. Newcombe’s lifelong interest in supporting students pursuing degrees in higher education. It has awarded scholarship and fellowship grants totaling over $50 million since 1981.

The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation identifies and develops the best minds for the nation’s most important challenges. In these areas of challenge, the Foundation awards fellowships to enrich human resources, works to improve public policy, and assists organizations and institutions in enhancing practice in the U.S. and abroad.